Archive for July, 2012

When you pay $2.2 billion for something , you expect to be able to do what you want with it. When you broadcast the Olympics, however, there's a certain lack of sympathy among viewers who understandably believe that your multibillion-dollar property belongs to the world. This is the trouble at NBCUniversal, which shelled out that staggering amount of money for the 2010 and 2012 Olympic games, sold $1 billion in ads , and hoped that it could continue to get traction in the Nielsen ratings among U.S. viewers who had to wait until prime time to watch all their most-anticipated events. But with the world getting smaller every day, an increasingly large part of of the Olympic viewership isn't interested in waiting for prime time so that NBC can shore up its ratings numbers, and the Peacock is trying to help them out with its new streaming offerings, including a sophisticated partnership with YouTube that allows the network to stream multiple events live. If only it worked as described. The streaming service has been plagued by feeds of events that aren't happening, feeds that pixellate or freeze, and are interrupted by ads every five minutes, whether or not a gymnast is hovering in mid-leap

Despite all the agita over NBC’s coverage of the 2012 London Olympic Games, fans continue to tune in to the prime-time broadcasts in record numbers. According to Nielsen, Friday night’s opening ceremony averaged 40.7 million total viewers, obliterating all previously held records for a Summer Olympics broadcast. Danny Boyle’s celebration of British history—an eye-popping pageant that incorporated everything from a tribute to the National Health Service to the base-jumping tandem of James Bond and Queen Elizabeth II —beat out the awesome-in-every-sense-of-the-word spectacle of the Beijing opener (34.9 million viewers) by 17 percent. The previous high-water mark for an opening ceremony was set at the 1996 Atlanta Games, which served up 39.8 million viewers. If NBC’s tape-delayed opener didn’t always connect with the Twitterati—viewers were particularly incensed by the omission of a tribute to the victims of the July 7, 2005, London terror attacks—the gaffes didn’t seem to have a material impact on America’s enthusiasm for watching the games on TV. On Saturday, 28.7 million viewers tuned in between approximately 8:30 p.m. EDT and 11:30 p.m. EDT, marking a 9 percent improvement from the previous record holder (Atlanta, 26.3 million viewers).

Facebook today debuted a new, grid-like structure for its Photos page, now showing full-screen shots and a mosaic layout under the photos section of a user’s page. The new style — which looks an awful lot like the photos layout for Google+ — will roll out to users globally over the coming weeks.

The oft-chronicled tale of Web 2.0 star Digg includes multiple incidents where the company alienated its users by making dramatic changes and policy decisions without much warning. The new Digg — bought by John Borthwick’s Betaworks — apparently won’t be like that. Today the company published screenshots and overviews of its upcoming product overhaul, six weeks into the new ownership. Digg still had more than 16 million monthly unique visitors when it was bought, but it’s possible that redesigning out in the open may help woo back the critical techies who had deemed Digg irrelevant. The new Digg is to be heavy on images. In addition to Diggs, the new calibrations of what stories matter will include Facebook posts and retweets as well as human homepage programming

What do you do after you build and sell a pioneering digital media startup? Take two years off, and start building another media startup. That’s the short version of Rafat Ali’s story. The slightly longer version: The guy who started PaidContent in 2002, sold it to the Guardian in 2008 and took off in 2010 is back with Skift . PaidContent covered the business of digital media; Skift covers the travel business, with an emphasis on that industry’s digital transformation. Ali has raised a $500,000 round from media-centric angels like former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, and former MySpace co-CEO Jason Hirschhorn. The pitch is pretty straightforward: No one does a very good job of covering the travel business, and there’s a wide range of people who want to read smart takes, from industry executives to startup investors to savvy consumers who want to figure out what’s happening behind the scenes.

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Talk NYC/WW is your daily download of the tech, marketing and advertising news you need to know. It’s smartly curated to keep you up to speed on the innovators and innovations that are shaking up the digital world today.